Quote

The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.

Stewart Brand

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Stewart Brand
Age: 85
Born: 1938
Born: December 14
Biologist
Essayist
Journalist
Writer
Rockford
Illinois
Longer
Dies
Future
Problem
Take
Suffused
Hard
Personally
Great
Absence
World
Especially

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For artists diving into a new technology, it is a triple short-cut to mastery: you get a free ride on the novelty of the medium there are no previous masters to surpass and after a few weeks, you are the master. Try that with the violin.
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One advantage of a solar collector in space: It would be some kind of origami thing that would unfold and be relatively light because it doesn't have gravity to deal with.
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Historians will consider this a dark age. Science historians can read Galileos technical correspondence from the 1590s but not Marvin Minskys from the 1960s.
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A library doesn't need windows. A library is a window.
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Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.
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A building is not something you finish. A building is something you start.
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This is pretty much the infrastructural stuff that comes along with large quantities of energy. Whichever technology we are looking at has serious hazardous issues.
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When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it right away.
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Certain knowledge of what to fight for, and what to fight against, gives meaning to life and provides its own version of discipline: never give up. That kind of meaning is illusory, I now believe, and blinkered. Fealty to a mystical absolute is a formula for disaster, especially in transformative times.
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Whenever I hear the word share I would reach for a gun if I had one. Share is frequently followed by the word feelings, and I have enough of my own thank you please do us both a favor and repress yours.
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As you gain elevation [on the mountain] your IQ goes down - but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not.
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We are as gods and might as well get good at it.
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Redefine the possible.
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The technology of synthetic biology is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.
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Programming (or making music) at night is dreamtime, a period exclusively mental, utterly absorbed, sustained and timeless, placeless, disembodied.
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Want to know where the action in a culture is? Watch where new language is turning up and where the lawyers collect, usually in that sequence.
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You own your own words, unless they contain information. In which case they belong to no one.
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When a generation talks just to itself, it becomes more filled with folly than it might have otherwise.
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All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.
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There should always be in sight the draw — a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth.
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